As good as Bruce Springsteen's music can still be, he feels more like a
corporation than a human being these days. But where corporate brands want you
to buy into their vision of being "cutting-edge," Springsteen hawks
earnestness—a proudly square and principled belief in old-fashioned liberal
American values and common-man sanctity. And like a lot of ubiquitous brands'
sales pitches, Springsteen's is an oddly impersonal message meant to reach the
cheap seats. Even his best songs nowadays can feel like slogans.

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The
arrival of his latest album High Hopes,
a collection of covers, revamped older songs and studio outtakes, drives this
point home precisely because its 12 tracks span Springsteen's late-career
renaissance of the past 15 years. "American Skin (41 Shots)" was originally
written in 2001 in the wake of Amadou Diallo's killing by the NYPD. The George
W. Bush allegory "Harry's Place" started out as leftover lyrics from The Rising, Springsteen's 2002 response
to 9/11. And the album's production, credited partly to Ron Aniello and Brendan
O'Brien, reflects the amped-up sound the two men have brought to recent
Springsteen albums like Wrecking Ball and
Magic.

High Hopes
is, by its very nature, not as cohesive as Springsteen's other 21st-century
records. But while there are strong songs, there are many more of the flaws
that have beleaguered Springsteen lately. The most glaring is how big these songs feel. Starting with his
1975 breakthrough Born to Run,
Springsteen (alongside the mighty, melodramatic fervor of the E Street Band)
has sought to harness a grand, almost cinematic framework for his music. But in
recent years, that desire has morphed into a vaguely anonymous enormity—songs
that are huge in scope but thin underneath. On a track such as "This Is Your
Sword," he goes for a Celtic arena-rock sound complete with violins and
feel-good mantras like "This is your sword, this is your shield / This is the
power of love revealed / Carry it with you wherever you go / And give all the
love that you have in your soul." It's a lamentable latter-day-Springsteen
trait: a song that offers generalized comfort delivered in a style that's so
overpowering that it's meant to connect with hundreds of thousands of people
collectively.

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While
Springsteen has often aimed for the bold declarative musical gesture, his earnest
lyrics usually focus on the travails of everyday life, sung in that dependably roughed-up
voice of his. But unlike his fellow 1980s superstars Michael Jackson, Prince
and Madonna, Springsteen had a message that didn't translate to global
domination. His lyrics were more personal and often political: He's explored
alienation ("Born to Run"), the scars of the Vietnam War ("Born in the
U.S.A."), the collapse of small towns ("My Hometown") and the struggle to make
a marriage last ("Brilliant Disguise"). That a songwriter of committed
consciousness could become a worldwide pop star underlines Springsteen's
ability to speak for a lot of people.

But
in the 1990s, Springsteen went solo and struggled to maintain that superstar
persona, releasing the blandly commercial Human
Touch and then retreating into the more stripped-down efforts Lucky Town and The Ghost of Tom Joad, which failed to make much of a dent in the
culture. (He did win an Oscar for his song "Streets of Philadelphia," though
its drum-machine-and-keyboard aesthetic seemed uncharacteristic of him.) His
second wind came, ironically, when he got the E Street Band back together and
recorded The Rising. Springsteen
famously told an interviewer that the reason he was inspired to make the album
shortly after 9/11 was because a fan came up to him and said, "We
need you now." It's understandable
why Springsteen would respond to such a request: As someone who's always
identified with (and sometimes romanticized) ordinary people, he no doubt saw
the album as a holy undertaking.

Occasionally
moving and stuffed with good intentions, The
Rising reinvigorated Springsteen's sense that he could be a voice for
others, expressing our collective anxiety and sadness after the terror attacks.
But on that album, he too often confused overinflated musical pyrotechnics for
genuine drama, letting bombastic bar-band theatrics and soapy strings get in
the way of the sentiments. (The task of encompassing all the emotions of 9/11
on a single album would have been daunting for any artist, but Springsteen's
effort faltered specifically because he tried so doggedly to encapsulate that
period through a series of booming, large-scale anthems. Even the ballads felt
epic.)

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Ever
since, whether on the folk-ish Devils
& Dust or the full-band assault of Wrecking
Ball and High Hopes, one can't
escape Springsteen's overarching need to
make statements about post-9/11 America.

That's
not to say that such statements are unappreciated or unnecessary. Several songs
from this era, like "Devils & Dust" and Magic's
"Last to Die," are angry, eloquent reactions to America's invasion of Iraq. Wrecking Ball's "We Take Care of Our
Own" is, like "Born in the U.S.A.," deceptively rousing, bitterly lamenting the
ways in which Americans have turned their back on people in need. But
especially on High Hopes, Springsteen
is guilty of writing songs that are the equivalent of Facebook status updates—he
expresses some vaguely progressive, non-controversial position that's easy for
his "friends" to "like" without thinking deeply about it. The Amadou
Diallo-focused "American Skin (41 Shots)" articulates a legitimate concern
about race in America—which remains relevant after the killing of Trayvon
Martin more than 10 years later—but the song (cornily dressed up in echo-y
reverb and churchly organ) plays to the choir and lacks subtlety. "Heaven's
Well," a gospel-rock song about spiritual salvation, takes a page from
Springsteen's onstage declarations about wanting to bathe his audience in the
redemptive power of rock 'n' roll: a laudable but not particularly revelatory
message.

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Springsteen's
music has always contained an intriguing juxtaposition: He asks his audience to
be politically aware but also encourages us to retreat into the nostalgic
backyard-barbeque vibe of party songs like High
Hopes' wan "Frankie Fell in
Love." Springsteen's pre-1990s music yielded this paradox as well, but it at
least possessed a lightness that made it charming—a recognition that the
regular people he sang about contained elements of both sorrow and joy. (A
perfect example is Born in the U.S.A.'s
misleadingly gleeful sing-along "Glory Days," which, as music critic Robert
Christgau wrote at the time, "acknowledges that among other things, getting old
is a good joke.")

Yet
that lightness has evaporated in the last decade, and consequently, an album
like High Hopes lumbers with noble
piety, making worthy ideals feel as grueling as being made to eat your
vegetables. Along those lines, it's noteworthy that Springsteen last year added
former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello to the live E Street Band
lineup, additionally having him be an instrumental focus on High Hopes. Morello favors a strident,
tediously sincere form of protest music on his own solo albums, as if what the
world needs is more people who strenuously mean well. That assessment fits High Hopes, too, never more so than on
the remake of "The Ghost of Tom Joad," Springsteen's 1990s folk song that Rage
Against the Machine transformed into a moody rock tune at its live shows. By
comparison, this new version finds Springsteen stoically trading verses with
Morello, the song's pungent, searing Dust Bowl narrative reduced to a groaning
seriousness as every lyric and showy guitar solo drips with importance.

These
problems, I suspect, aren't a liability to Springsteen's biggest fans. In fact,
they're selling points. Even at the zenith of his career, Springsteen was never
hip, which also separated him from superstar peers like Prince. Rock-ribbed
sincerity has been his brand from the beginning, and it's a quality that
explains his audience's deep connection with him. His is the sort of music that
fathers pass down to sons and that people use to map the course of their lives.
(Anecdotally, I know two married couples—big Springsteen fans—whose first song
at their wedding was Lucky Town's "If I Should Fall Behind," an ode to
commitment that Springsteen and his wife, E Street member Patti Scialfa, duet
on during shows.)

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But
to me, such adoration for Springsteen feels no different than the brand loyalty
some show to Apple or Coca-Cola. Springsteen stands for something bigger than
himself: a voice for the little man, a mouthpiece for America's most enduring
values, a symbol of artistic integrity unsullied by pretension or rock-star
entitlement. Along the way, though, the symbol got in the way of the tunes.
When music critics use the phrase "corporate rock," they're referring to
soulless industry-packaged bands that slavishly chase musical trends: the hair-metal
mania of the 1980s, the cynical displays of angst and flannel after Nirvana
broke big in the early 1990s. Springsteen's music is miles better than those
groups', but in its own way, there's something corporate and big-brand about
his recent albums. When you buy High
Hopes, you're not just buying a Springsteen record—you're buying into the
notion of what Springsteen feels is his solemn duty to the consumer.
Personally, I preferred him when he was just dancing in the dark.

Tim Grierson is Playboy for iPhone's critic-at-large.
His
biography of Wilco, "Sunken
Treasure," is
available now on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @timgrierson.